


in all i've done

by endquestionmark



Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-20
Updated: 2012-11-20
Packaged: 2017-11-19 02:41:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/568152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>M’s been followed around for most of her adult life by these possibilities - poison, neurotoxin, explosion, car accident - just a few of a million of the things she knows are probable, to say nothing of the more bizarre options.  Death by jellyfish.  Death by pocket change.  Death by coffee.  She copes with it the way she always has, from her time in Hong Kong to her humble beginnings when she eventually turned to desk work; she sees herself as a dead woman walking, resigns herself to the possibility and the probability, and gets on with her life like everyone else.</p><p>(Massive, massive spoilers for Skyfall.  Heed the warnings.  That said: Groundhog Day fic based around the end of Skyfall.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	in all i've done

She might not see every possibility, but that’s why she runs a department, isn’t it. No one person can figure out everything that could happen, let alone whether it will or should, but put enough people together in one place and they tend to cover all the probabilities, at least.

Put enough people together in one place - namely, working for you; namely, working for you in one of the most cutthroat industries in the world - and what you tend to hear a lot about is the possibilities of something happening to you. Something with a capital S, that is - and while they seem to only be able to come up with probabilities when it comes like revolutions and covert arms sales, they seem to be able to come up with every possibility, no matter how outlandish, when it comes to her death.

(The only subject they’ve been able to speculate on as productively and profusely is what - and who - Bond will do next, probably because all outcomes are equally probable when you have a near-literal loose cannon running around.)

M’s been followed around for most of her adult life by these possibilities - poison, neurotoxin, explosion, car accident - just a few of a million of the things she knows are probable, to say nothing of the more bizarre options. Death by jellyfish. Death by pocket change. Death by coffee. She copes with it the way she always has, from her time in Hong Kong to her humble beginnings when she eventually turned to desk work; she sees herself as a dead woman walking, resigns herself to the possibility and the probability, and gets on with her life like everyone else.

Not that it isn’t something that she dwells on in the small hours of the morning, of course. She expects to die by gunshot, knife wound, gas explosion, grenade - something pedantic and barely worth the obituary. Not for her, this business of getting shot on top of a train and then going over a waterfall. Even if she manages to survive something resembling a natural lifespan, she expects to die in her sleep or of a broken hip or a heart attack; nothing to write home about.

Then, of course, her office blows up. That’s a bit of a spanner in the works.

++

The first time she dies, Silva bursts into her hearing. Mallory isn’t quite quick enough. At least he’ll be ready to take up her mantle, she supposes, and the gunshot is like a punch to her solar plexus - it knocks the breath out of her and remains, like the weight of years and bad decisions, solid upon her chest for a moment.

Tanner looks stricken. Mallory pulls him away. Somewhere behind them, Eve opens covering fire. People scream. People die.

She doesn’t panic until the pressure on her chest increases, more and more and - 

++

She wakes up. She is in the car, on the way to her hearing. Tanner coughs politely and looks away as she blinks the drowsiness from her eyes.

There is no blood on her hands; there is no blood on her clothes. She puts it down to a bad dream and sorts through her notes one last time before consigning them to the seat between them.

The second time, Bond gets to the hearing on time. Mallory is quick enough - for her at least - and Eve opens up covering fire, and the fire extinguishers burst, and Bond gets her away into the night, from a black conspicuous car to a flash one, and she spends the entire trip up waiting for pressure. Breathing is too easy. She can feel her pulse in her wrists and her throat and the steady thump of her heart.

She might consign the whole experience to dreams, but even so it’s one she remembers remarkably well. It’s quite hard to forget what happens when your heart is straining to beat with every fiber and simply - can’t; it’s hard to forget gasping for a breath that won’t come. She keeps expecting to slip out of herself. She expects a punchline.

She doesn’t get one until the first wave of men burst into the house and shoot her, there where she stands in the dining room. It reminds her of falling asleep in a hailstorm. They are neither precise nor inclined to be. It is messy and slow and she recognizes this - she recognizes the creaking of her ribs - and then there one of them actually sights properly. She’s been here many times before, on the wrong end of a gun barrel.

There’s a flash and -

++

She wakes up. She is in the car, on the way to Skyfall. There is no pressure on her chest but that of the honest-to-God driving blanket Bond tossed her from the boot, but even that’s too much, and she bundles it up on her lap and tucks it down the side of her seat.

Bond is, of course, still awake; they are driving through countryside she cannot identify, and if she’s been dreaming he gives no indication of it. She turns her face to the window, letting her head fall back against the seat, and wonders why, in her entire life, the two things she hasn’t gotten right just keep coming back to bite her in the arse.

(Of course she’s gotten more things wrong, even by her blurred standards. Here and now, though, they don’t seem to matter so much. She is safe, at least for now; she is on her way to a safe house; she is going to die. She is, now more so than ever, a dead woman walking, and she wishes she knew why.)

She goes through the whole pantomime of it again, hanging nail bombs from the chandeliers, watching Bond rig up the floorboards, walking through a dead house with a dead history next to the only living things for miles, and feels strangely peaceful. She will die here. There’s too much drawing her here for her to ever leave, really. Kincade saws off the barrels of his shotgun. Bond boards up the windows. She takes her gun.

“I really fucked this up, didn’t I,” she asks, and knows it doesn’t make a damn difference what the answer is.

They make it through the first wave, this time, and for the first time M actually feels inclined to see herself as alive, and intending to remain that way. The last of the men drops, and Kincade and Bond wait the obligatory minute to look at each other. Hope is a dangerous thing.

Of course, then the second wave arrives.

They open with machine gun fire from the helicopter, and she almost expects the impacts again, but they make it to cover in time, again and again, and she can feel the pulse in her throat and the breath singing in her lungs and the wild rush of adrenaline. Her hindbrain screams at her, wordless, the same primal impulse to cling to life by her teeth she used to feel every day before she put such things aside.

She wants to snarl.

None of them notice the grenade until it’s rolled almost to their feet.

He dives for her, and that’s what she sees - his eyes, the nameless desperation on his face, and then -

++

She shakes herself from her reverie. “I really fucked this up, didn’t I,” she asks. Words to cling to. How many times has it been now - three? She just wants to rest. Bond doesn’t answer.

In the distance, dogs bark.

“Take care of yourself,” she says, on impulse, and he acknowledges it with a tilt of his head and disappears out to that bloody car.

Gunfire in the distance, and she just wants to lie down and sleep.

++

The tunnel collapses. Pressure and then -

++

The ice cracks. That time, she feels as if her bones are going to shake apart; she feels as if she’s never going to be warm again; she feels as if she’s a singularity; a tingle of warmth spreads across her skin like a newspaper catching fire; Kincade drags her out; being awake is so difficult, and then - 

++

He shoots her. She is on her knees, facing up the aisle; he is behind her, standing; “think on your sins,” he says, and then - 

++

She is in the church, waiting. She is running across the moors, waiting. She is in the tunnel, waiting.

She wakes up.

++

The gunshot is like a punch to her solar plexus. The pressure isn’t there - not yet - but she can feel the ghost of it, from deaths and deaths and deaths. She wishes she could get at least this right. She wishes, of all the damn things she’s fucked up, she could at least get this one right, just once. That’s all it would take.

The tunnel reels around her, and her side is wet and her hand is sticky with drying blood; the moors are all-encompassing darkness, and then the house goes up. No matter how many times she sees it, she still feels the same pang of regret from one lost dead thing to another. She staggers on, Kincade reassuring warmth and weight against her side. Breathing is hard; standing is harder; the chapel is just ahead of them, chilly and forbidding.

“Put an end to this,” he begs, and she would - she really would - but she’s done it, she’s done it and done it and done it, and she couldn’t even get that right, so instead she just gulps in another breath. Her penance is to live. _Think on your sins._ God knows she’s had enough time. This is where it always ends, one way or another - he pulls the trigger, she pulls the trigger, Kincade fires a shot, she bleeds out. Over and over and over. She’s stuck here. She’d say she’s got plenty of time to think.

Then he staggers and snarls and she thinks, _please God, just this once. Just this one thing._

“Last rat standing,” he says, and she wants to slap him, she wants to kiss him, she wants to feel his arms around her, she wants to have him shot; she wants to tell him all of this, and so of course she goes and says “what took you so bloody long?” It’s the same thing in the long run, anyway.

Then, of course, she staggers; he catches her; it’s very much not the same thing when you want to put every last thing into words and you know you’d never have enough words even if you had enough time. Even if you had all the time in the world.

She looks at him, and he’s bright even through the blur of her vision, the burning of her chest, and picks her words carefully. _Finally did it_ , she thinks wryly. _Finally -_

“I did get one thing right,” she says, before she can think about it or take it back or fuck that up too. The pressure is nearly unbearable, and her vision is nearly gone, but. But at least she did get something right, didn’t she. At least in the end - 

++

He closes her eyes, kneeling there in the debris of his past and his present, in the shadow of his future.

Burning embers and red-hot metal cool, hissing in the early morning damp.

In the far distance, invisible over the horizon, the sun begins to rise, burning away the fog, and something uncatches, and while the sunrise is not yet visible over the remains of Skyfall it will be, in time, right.


End file.
